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Driving Bounces Back

By | | Transportation
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The mayor of San Diego wants to spend $177 billion expanding the region’s transit system in order to make San Diego like “Barcelona, Madrid, Paris.” Meanwhile, Barcelona, Madrid, and Paris are becoming more like U.S. cities, at least in terms of the transportation habits of their residents. Driving is the dominant form of travel in all European cities and is rebounding fast after pandemic lock-downs.

Of course, driving is rebounding even faster in the United States, according to INRIX estimates. Total driving at the end of June, the entire month of July, and the first week of August was more than it had been in the weeks before the pandemic. Of course, it was the middle of winter before the virus, but that’s still an impressive comeback.

Interestingly, that driving hasn’t brought congestion back to its pre-COVID levels. Morning rush-hour driving in most urban areas was only only around 70 to 80 percent of pre-shutdown levels while afternoon rush-hour driving was 80 to 90 percent, with afternoon levels exceeding 100 percent in just a couple of urban areas. As a result, rush-hour speeds are significantly higher than they were before the pandemic. Continue reading →

June Ridership Down Nearly 70 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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America’s public transit systems carried 69.3 percent fewer riders in June 2020 than in June 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last Friday. Rail ridership was down 83 percent while bus ridership was down only 56 percent.

That’s an improvement from May, when total ridership was down 81 percent from the previous May. But it’s still a disastrous drop that is leading transit agencies to demand another $32 billion in federal subsidies on top of the $25 billion it received in March, which is on top of the $13 billion it received for 2020 before the pandemic. If Congress provides the $32 billion, the transit industry will have received more money in 2020 from the federal government alone than all of its funding from all sources, including fares, in 2018.

We’ll have June driving data in a few days, but in the meantime June’s gasoline consumption was only 14 percent below June of 2019, suggesting that driving has nearly recovered to its pre-pandemic levels. Unfortunately, this doesn’t discourage anti-auto groups who are using the pandemic to justify closing streets and lanes to auto traffic. Continue reading →

Taking the Rapid Out of Bus-Rapid Transit

By | | Transportation
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International Boulevard is a major northwest-southeast arterial that connects Oakland, California with its suburb of San Leandro. Until recently, it served businesses along the route with four lanes of through traffic, a center left-turn lane, and a parking strip on one and in some places both sides of the street.

Here’s a Google streetview of part of International Boulevard before AC Transit began turning it into a BRT route.

That’s changed as AC (for Alameda-Contra Costa) Transit has claimed most of the street for a bus-rapid transit route that is scheduled to start operating next week. Built at a cost of $232 million, the route reduces much of International Boulevard to a two-lane street with only a few left-turn lanes and few or no parking strips. Continue reading →

The Future of Driving

By | | Transportation
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A new study from accounting firm KPMG predicts that auto travel in the United States will be 9 to 10 percent less after the pandemic than it was before. Telecommuting, says the report, will lead to a 10 to 20 percent reduction in commuting by car while on-line shopping will lead to a 10 to 30 percent reduction in shopping trips.

This is good news to the transit-loving, auto-hating folks at Streetsblog, who celebrate “14 million cars off the road forever” but warn that “if we don’t act fast, they’ll come back” (which makes “forever” somewhat dubious). The “actions” they advocate call for giving the transit industry another $32 billion right away so it can keep its empty transit vehicles clean and even more money after that so it can increase the frequencies of those empty buses and trains.

If you believe the KPMG report, however, that’s not going to work. The report also found that 43 percent of former transit riders don’t plan to go back to riding transit after the pandemic, and most of them will substitute autos for transit. If true, that will increase driving by about 5 billion vehicle miles. KPMG admitted that transit’s loss would somewhat offset the decrease in auto travel, but did not include that in its calculations. Continue reading →

Second-Class Transportation

By | | Transportation
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Is transit second-class transportation, as I argued in an op-ed in the San Antonio News-Express, or are the people who ride transit second-class citizens, as a response from urban planner named Bill Barker implies that I said? Like this question, most of his response focuses on semantics, not reality.

For example, he claims that the billions of dollars that taxpayers are forced to pay to transit agencies aren’t subsidies because he says he found a dictionary that defines subsidies as “a grant to a private company.” Transit agencies aren’t private companies, he notes, so therefore they aren’t subsidized. (No dictionaries I’ve looked at specifies that money has to go to a private company to be considered a subsidy.)

In response to clear evidence that taxpayers pay more than 90 percent of the cost of running San Antonio transit, he alleges that “billions of dollars in transportation subsidies are going to Boeing, General Motors, Ford Motor Co.” Say what? I’m not sure why Boeing is relevant, but I don’t know of any subsidies going to General Motors or Ford. As near as I can determine, neither received funding from the CARES Act, and while the federal government “saved” General Motors from bankruptcy in 2008 by forcing it into bankruptcy, Ford didn’t receive any federal subsidies at that time. (Ford did receive some loans but repaid them, and by Barker’s definition only grants, not loans, are subsidies.) Continue reading →

Should Transit Subsidize Ride Hailing?

By | | Transportation
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A recent report from the Chaddick Institute, which is known to Antiplanner readers for its work on intercity buses, examines a dozen “partnerships” between transit agencies and ride-hailing companies. I put partnerships in quotation marks because I suspect these arrangements could easily prove predatory on one side or the other.

Click image to download a copy of this 37-page report.

The report notes that transit agencies have sought such partnerships for one of three reasons:

  1. To provide transit riders with a first or last mile service between transit stops and their actual origins or destinations;
  2. As an alternative to regular service in areas with low demand;
  3. As an alternative to paratransit services to seniors and/or disabled people.

Continue reading →

Transit Industry Demands $32 Billion More

By | | Transportation
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The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) wants Congress to have the federal government “invest” — meaning pour down a rathole give away — another $32 billion to keep transit systems running. This is after Congress had already given transit systems $25 billion in March.

Taken together, $57 billion is more than all federal, state, and local transit subsidies in 2018, which were $54 billion. “Fare revenues are down 90 percent and our state and local funders face a financial crisis of their own,” says Paul Weidefield, the CEO of Washington Metro. “How are we going to provide the essential service” if they don’t get more subsidies?

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It’s Essential to Say “Transit Is Essential”

By | | Transportation
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The coronavirus has made it essential that every transit supporter use the word “essential” in their discussions, as in how essential it is that transit carry essential workers to their essential jobs. Ridership may be down by more than 80 percent, but the remaining 19 percent of riders are really essential, so that makes it essential that we keep giving more subsidies to essential transit agencies.

Transit Is Essential is, in fact, the name of a new paper from the California Transit Association. The paper skips over the whole messy part about why transit is so essential and instead goes immediately to demanding more subsidies. “Another round of emergency funding is critical to preventing significant and permanent reductions in transit services.” In other words, subsidies aren’t just essential, they are critical.

According to the New York-based TransitCenter, “an estimated 2.8 million American workers in essential industries commute[d] to work on transit” in 2018. That doesn’t say how they are commuting to work now, in the midst of the pandemic. But let’s say it is still 2.8 million: for less than the cost of the annual subsidy to transit in a normal year ($54 billion in 2018), we could give every one of those people a brand-new car, which the CDC says is safer than transit during the pandemic. So, tell me again, why is transit so essential? Continue reading →

Don’t Trap the Poor in Second-Class

By | | Transportation
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Some have argued that subsidies to transit are “socially just” because they help poor people, and some have even gone so far as to say that social justice requires that transit be free. But an opinion piece in Friday’s San Antonio News Express responds that transit is second-class transportation. Those who want to help low-income people should instead focus on helping them acquire first-class transportation, namely automobiles.

Automobiles are so much superior to transit that, except in New York City, it is overly generous to call second class. Steerage is more like it, since transit is so much slower, inconvenient, and less comfortable than traveling in your own private automobile. (I would have used the word steerage in the headline, but I was told that many people wouldn’t know what it was, at least out of context. I guess it’s been a long time since Titanic came out.)
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San Antonio is the largest urban area in the United States that hasn’t succumbed to the fad of building nineteenth-century rail transit. Some people would like to change that. Maybe this op-ed will help dissuade them.

Rebuild the Interstate Highway System?

By | | Transportation
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A new report from The Road Information Project (TRIP) estimates that rebuilding and expanding the Interstate Highway System to meet twenty-first century needs will require increasing annual expenditures on the system from $23 billion to $57 billion per year. The report says that the highways “are wearing out and showing signs of their advanced age, often heavily congested, and in need of significant reconstruction, modernization and expansion.”

However, the numbers in the report don’t necessarily support this. The report admits that only 3 percent of interstate highway pavements are in poor condition, while another 8 percent is considered mediocre and 9 percent fair. That leaves the vast majority of the system, 79 percent, in good condition. Similarly, only 3 percent of interstate highway bridges are in poor condition or considered structurally deficient.

Congestion is a problem, but it is confined mainly to urban roads. Only 18 percent of interstate highway miles are considered congested, says the report. Continue reading →